“I guess I missed that.”
“Yeah, well, they were written in this century, so.” A faint huff accompanied this remark, not quite a laugh but close enough to sting.
“Other centuries have a lot to offer. When you think about it.” It sounded tentative and mealy-mouthed. The temptation to kick myself was strong. Way to be scintillating, Mary!
Anjuli gave a dismissive hair toss. “I’m about the now. No doilies for me.” Pittaya glanced between us, a faint pucker to his forehead. “That’s why I’m taking Modeling and Design.”
It took me a second to place the name, given how quickly I’d breezed past it in the list of elective options. “Isn’t that the class where you build stuff?”
“Yes, Mary. I’m going to get my hands dirty and actually create things instead of living in the abstract.” Her slender (and perfectly clean) fingers brushed the back of Pittaya’s wrist. “You understand. As an artist.”
I blinked at this tableau, wondering if I’d accidentally slept through the first six months of my sophomore year and missed certain developments. Like the one where my name now doubled as an insult.
“So what kind of stuff will you make?” I asked, hoping to shift the conversation onto less contentious ground. “Is it about putting together birdhouses and whatnot?”
“I’m not in jail. This is a maker space, for skilled artisans. It’s part of how I’m redefining myself.”
“All right if I take this?” an unfamiliar voice cut in.
A boy in blue gestured at one of the unoccupied chairs. Grateful for the distraction, I started to say please do . . . only to feel the words wither on my tongue. The dark-blond curls were a little longer, the jawline a shade more defined, but the eyes remained bright as ever, a near match for the shade of his shirt. I know you, I thought, as our gazes collided.
“I told you we could share,” whined a pink-clad girl who had appeared beside him, tugging ineffectually at his elbow. I didn’t realize I was frowning until his brows drew together.
“Come on,” his companion urged.
“You only want me for my tater tots,” he teased as he dragged the chair back to their table.
Anjuli waited until the pastel pair were seated to address me. “What was that?”
“Nothing.” As in, nothing I want to discuss.
Chin in hand, she stared at the overcrowded table that had spawned our chair thief. Every last one of them sparkled with teenage joie de vivre. It was like peeking through the window of a London drawing room to watch the aristocrats strut and pose. I felt like a scullery maid by comparison, lurking in the background until someone needed their fireplace cleaned.
“Talk about a lost opportunity.” Anjuli emptied her juice pouch with an angry slurp.
“It really wasn’t.” By now he would have forgotten our existence, if he’d noticed us in the first place.
“A cute guy walks up—”
“Don’t be taken in by the pretty face. Handsome is as handsome does.”
“What does that even—you know what, never mind. The point is, we could have had a moment.”
“While he stole one of our chairs?”
“And instead of being friendly,” she continued as if I hadn’t spoken, “you looked at him like he was a bowl of dog food.”
I snuck another glance at the beautiful people, a flicker of doubt tightening my chest. Had I been rude? He was talking to a different girl now. Whatever he’d said must have been charming; the shoulders of the dark-haired girl’s companions shook in a chorus of giggles. Growing desperate, the girl in pink shoved a tater tot past his lips, forcing him to look her way or asphyxiate.
“He’s not exactly suffering.” When I turned back to Anjuli, thinking she might concede the point, her eyes were closed and her fingertips were pressed to her temples.
“I saw some girls today.” She spoke without opening her eyes. “I’m pretty sure they made their own clothes. Really long skirts. They were talking about slow cooker recipes.”
I glanced at Pittaya, but he appeared equally clueless. “Why are you telling me this?”
“They might be your kind of people.”
My pulse whooshed in my ears. “I don’t care about slow cookers. Or sewing.”
Anjuli’s eyes opened, but instead of looking at me she studied her hands, bedecked with several new rings. A daisy, a skull, some kind of animal . . . it was hard to tell what aesthetic she was going for. “They like old-fashioned stuff.”
“Thanks for the tip.” I tried to keep my voice light, but even to my ears it sounded shrill. “I’m sure there are plenty of people at this school who share my interests.”
Turning hopefully to the teeming hordes around us, I searched for a likely candidate. It was hard to tell that kind of thing from the outside, but I doubted the guy dribbling chocolate milk onto his neighbor’s hamburger was a kindred soul. Or the person gouging a tabletop with her ballpoint.
My gaze hopped sideways, inadvertently landing on the boy in blue. He must have been in a brief lull between flirtations, because he looked back at me with raised brows. I shook my head, wishing there was a telepathic way to convey that the eye contact had been accidental. He could scratch my name off his list of admirers. If he actually knew my name.
Which he did not.
“Did you talk to anyone in your classes?” Anjuli asked, not bothering to hide her skepticism.
“It’s the first day. My sisters said—”
“Your sisters had cool interests.” Anjuli speared a segment of mandarin orange from the plastic cup in front of her, pointing at me with the dripping fork. “I guarantee there’s no such thing as a Moldy Old Books group at this school. Nobody here wants to sit around drinking tea with their pinkie sticking out.”
“My pinkie just does that. It’s not an affectation. And you read, too.” On the rare occasions we’d socialized outside school, most of our time had been spent reading together—or rather, in the same room.
“Yeah, sci-fi, which is full of cutting-edge discourse.”
I thought dubiously of the covers of her paperbacks, with their skintight spacesuits and phallic ray guns. “My books have a lot of deeper meanings. Moral lessons. Et cetera.”
Sighing, she glanced at her watch.
“Is lunch almost over?” Pittaya asked hopefully.
Anjuli shook her head. “Some people from EFS said they might stop by.”
“Effs?” I echoed.
“Experimental Film Society.” From her long-suffering tone, you would have thought I’d asked how to tie my shoes. “Nonlinear, nonnarrative, avant-garde cinema. It’s very political.” She bit her lip. “They should have been here by now.”
I knew Anjuli well enough to read the anxious creasing of her brow: Maybe they weren’t coming at all. She’d been stood up. Snubbed. As a friend I should have shared her dismay, but a secret part of me was relieved.
Despite my ambivalence, I was struggling to come up with a neutral-yet-sympathetic response when a trio of strangers approached. Ordinarily my curiosity would have been piqued, but I was too startled by the change in Anjuli to pay them any mind. In an instant she’d gone from clouds to sun, her body language unfurling like a flower.
“Hey!” Where a moment ago every word had emerged weary and annoyed, her voice now crackled with energy. “This is Pittaya, the one I told you about. He’s an amazing painter.”
Greetings were mumbled. I waited for Anjuli to introduce me, but she was focused on the empty chairs. Later I would find it impossible to say how much time elapsed in tortured silence before it clicked: two chairs, three people. Anjuli barely looking at me throughout lunch. Her attempt to fob me off on random stew-making seamstresses. The simmering undercurrent of irritation.
How could I have been so foolish? She hadn’t been waiting for me to show up; she didn’t want me there at all.
I pushed my chair back. “I have a . . . prior engagement.” The words were barely audible, addressed to no one in parti
cular.
Pittaya gave a microscopic nod. Anjuli pretended not to hear, laughing with one of her new friends at some inconsequential remark. I wouldn’t have been surprised to look down and find that I’d become ghostly and insubstantial. Invisible to the naked eye.
Gathering the scraps of my dignity, and my lunch, I fled.
Dear Diary,
I wonder if the popular crowd in high school will be as ruthless as the society mavens in an Edith Wharton novel. Probably that dynamic exists in any stratified society, with the upper echelon cutting people down to maintain their own power and position.
The good news is that I have no desire to be part of the ruling class or their cruel games. Give me a simple life with interesting companions, far from the movers and shakers. I’d rather be safe than sorry any day.
M.P.M.
Chapter 3
When at last the final bell signaled the great stampede toward the parking lot, I snuck out a side door and cut across the sloping green lawn that always made my mother grumble about water shortages. I had decided to detour through downtown to reduce the risk of crossing paths with Anjuli. The charms of Millville’s quaint shopping district, the flower boxes and sidewalk cafes, were lost on me; I was seeking sanctuary, not an overpriced sandwich. The entire concept of sandwiches had been poisoned in the wake of the Shunning.
As I walked, my thoughts continued to circle the fateful lunchroom encounter, rewriting it in my head. Et tu, Anjuli? That would have been a good parting salvo, and not just because we’d read Julius Caesar last year. It felt like a stabbing. She’d opened a hole in my side, and now everything was leaking out. Not blood and guts, but all my comfortable assumptions about the world and my place in it. My idea of interpersonal conflict was a discreet verbal jab: I take no leave of you. I send no compliments to your mother. Not silently repudiating your oldest friend.
And okay, maybe on some level I’d been aware that things between us had been strained of late, but it was like hearing an odd noise in the middle of the night. A reasonable person pulled the covers over her head and pretended everything was fine, because what were the odds of assassins creeping up the stairs . . . or sitting next to you in the cafeteria?
If this were a novel, I would have staggered around moaning and wailing with the shock of betrayal. But you couldn’t do those things in real life, at least not where people from your high school might see. I was already an outcast; no point making things worse. The most I could allow myself was to slow my steps to a trudge, staring numbly at storefronts I’d seen a thousand times before.
A flurry of movement caught my eye. Someone was gesturing at me from inside Toil & Trouble, one of Millville’s many used bookstores. That was one of our town’s claims to fame: too small for big box superstores, yet bursting with booksellers and coffee shops. Or in the case of Toil & Trouble, a bookstore/café combo.
Momentary panic seized me at the thought that the person trying to get my attention might be Noreen, Toil & Trouble’s sour and oversharing proprietor, who assumed every customer had come in search of detailed accounts of her medical history. But no, it was Marco, one of my father’s grad students. I started to wave back before realizing he was beckoning me inside.
Soothing flute music heralded my entrance, the mingled scents of coffee, incense, and mildewed paper rising in welcome. It was a few degrees cooler inside, away from the direct heat of the sun. My spirits climbed fractionally. Why not hide out here instead of going straight home, where someone might ask about my day? I was heading for the fiction aisle when Marco edged in front of me.
“How’s it going?” he asked, stroking his overgrown beard. Viking chic was all the rage among English majors these days. His eyes darted to the door before returning to my face.
“Okay.” I had the strong impression he wasn’t really listening, despite the nod.
“You busy right now?”
“Not really.” Surely he wasn’t about to ask me to hang out. My mind dismissed the possibility as soon as it arose, which wasn’t quickly enough to arrest the heat I could feel rising into my cheeks.
Another furtive glance at the exit, and then his feet. “Listen, I really need to run to campus and talk to your dad, but his office hours will be over by the time I get off.”
I looked at him blankly, not unsympathetic but unclear as to how I could help.
“If you could just sit up front until I get back, that would be excellent.” He pulled a white hand towel out of his waistband and handed it to me. “You don’t have to do anything. I usually get some reading in.”
“What if someone wants to buy something?”
“Highly unlikely. Check it out,” he said, leading me to the front counter. “Cash register, coffee machine, phone.” Marco pointed at each item in turn, already backing toward the door.
“But—”
“I owe you big time,” he called out, breaking into a run as soon as he hit the sidewalk.
Silence settled over the bookshop. No doubt Marco was right; all I had to do was sit here and await his return. Downtown brushed right against the edge of campus, so it wasn’t even a very long walk. Climbing onto the wooden stool behind the counter, I pulled my backpack onto my lap. The biology worksheet didn’t appeal, and I felt I’d been punished enough without subjecting myself to Algebra II. Social studies would have to do.
I had just opened the battered textbook when the bell over the door jingled.
The bad news hit me in stages: Customers.
Plural.
And they went to my school, a place I’d hoped to erase from my consciousness until tomorrow morning.
Worst of all, there was a chance this trio of girls had actually witnessed my humiliation. The one in the lead had candy-red hair, a shade so distinctive I immediately recalled where I’d seen it before: at the table of glistening, giggling, popular kids. The who’s who of High School High Society had just walked through the door of Toil & Trouble. And they were headed straight for me.
I closed my book and set it aside. Maybe they were lost and had merely stopped in for directions. Any request I could answer by pointing should be within my capabilities.
“Hi,” said the one I mentally dubbed the Crimson Contessa. There was a subtle air of sophistication to her tortoiseshell sunglasses and crisp white shirt, not to mention the textured leather bag resting in the crook of her elbow. As often happened with new people, I imagined how she would be described in a book. Long-limbed and narrow, with pencil-thin brows and a severe bob, she stood with an air of . . . waiting for me to respond to her greeting.
I inhaled too deeply, choking out a hello.
She smiled warmly before turning her attention to the chalkboard menu on the wall behind me. “How’s the Mystic Mayan?”
Using the contextual clues, I figured out she was talking about a coffee drink. “I’ve never tried it,” I said sheepishly. “More of a tea person.”
The Contessa’s cheerfulness was undimmed. “Okay. I think I’ll go for that one. Why not?” She bounced to one side, making room for the next girl, who had her back to me as she spoke to the third member of their party. This one was smaller in stature, with a softly rounded figure and an evident preference for pastels. Her long ash-blond hair was held back with a cheerful headband. The overall effect was sweet and feminine—the nineteenth-century ideal of womanhood. I’ll call her the Milkmaid, I thought as she turned.
It was all I could do not to take a step back. The look on her face wasn’t unfriendly, exactly, but the hawk-like brown eyes issued a clear warning. Don’t try any funny business. The adjective that came to mind was no-nonsense, because clearly all nonsense had been glared into submission until it backed from the room on its knees, gibbering apologies. She slapped both palms onto the scarred wooden counter.
“Iced mocha,” she announced, and her voice matched her expression: forceful and businesslike, with a hint of rasp. Not a simpering Victorian milkmaid at all. She should be called Madam Something—Madam CEO, p
erhaps.
I was on the point of explaining that I had no idea how to make a mocha, iced or otherwise, when the third girl stepped forward. My eyes widened. She was so winsome and gamine, with high rounded cheeks tapering to a daintily pointed chin and huge brown eyes fringed in luxuriant lashes. Her black hair was abundant and wavy, falling around her shoulders like a dark cloud.
“I know,” the Contessa said, catching my eye. “She looks like a princess.”
My thoughts had been more along the lines of Natasha, the ingénue from War and Peace, but we probably meant the same thing. The Beauty looked at the floor, her perfect cheeks burning, and I had the revolutionary idea that it must be uncomfortable to be stared at all the time, even if everyone was doing so out of admiration.
“What do you want?” Madam CEO asked her shy friend, indicating the menu on the wall. This time I looked at it too, both because it was equally new to me and to give the Beauty a respite from being gaped at.
“Do you have any cookies?” She scanned the shelves of coffee accoutrements with a hopeful expression.
“No sweets, I’m afraid. Noreen—who owns this place—can only serve beverages. Her ex got the baking rights when they split.” In my family, this episode was known as the Great Used Bookstore Schism.
“Her ex runs a bakery?” Madam asked.
I shook my head. “Another bookstore, right across the street. Tome Raider.”
“Dramatic.” The Contessa looked impressed. “So is this like your afterschool job?”
It took me a second to realize she was talking to me. “I don’t work here.”
She gave me a funny look.
“I’m covering for someone,” I explained, earning a chorus of ohs. It would have been nice to end on that moment of perfect understanding, but the Contessa had already pulled out her wallet.
“How much do we owe you for the drinks?”
“Actually—” The machine is broken. We’re out of coffee. The city shut off our water supply. Excuses flitted through my consciousness, but in the end, I wasn’t bold enough for an outright lie. “I’ve never made coffee before. I could help you find books?”
By the Book Page 2
